03.27.21

i read a bunch of reviews of the movie we watched this evening as well; this time it was the story of a pair of demonic pants, not to be confused with the icelandic demonic pants that will produce endless riches but consign you to persecution if you have the misfortune to be wearing them when you die. i think i appreciate what it had to say about fast fashion? i definitely appreciate what it had to say about the many ways in which premium denim can be lethal. i enjoy thinking about how nondescript objects might be lethal; when i am seated at a weird table at a wedding i inevitably ask everyone how they would kill a man if they had to use the objects with which we are all surrounded, which is probably how i end up at those tables.

a terrible conversation bloomed in one of my friend groups a couple of months ago after one of us posted a news item about an unfortunate person whose medical condition rendered them unconscious for most of the pandemic. would have been great, right? a dear friend said. just being unconscious through all of this? my dear's comment was throwaway, but she launched A Whole Thing about how each of us in that friend-aggregation has felt about the pandemic, and maybe about pain and tribulation in general. me, i have been having conversations with old friends that probably wouldn't have happened until one of us died. that doesn't make me glad that we have had the year we've had, but it's ours; i'm not giving it back and i'm not forgetting.

03.17.15

one of the six dozen public-address systems along the half marathon route began to thump with the piano notes at the top of "empire state of mind" as i made the turn from seventh avenue to forty-second street. i'm guessing it played once every ten minutes for three or four hours sunday morning, but there was something undeniably inspirational about how jay z kicked in just as my metrocard completed its intimate migration down my running shorts (when i am a second-time half-marathoner i shall wear pockets). last week i speculated that i became a real new yorker when a fancy pigeon pooped in my armpit; i now know that the magic happens when one runs through times square with a metrocard in one's ass. excelsior!

01.02.13

the year, internets. she is new. i've wrestled a refill into my bright red exacompta desk planner (no digital planning in 2013! or 2012, or 2011, &c.), the party pants have migrated to the back of the closet, and drinking before noon will be taboo for at least a few months (holiday brunches, you are uncompromising). i continue to pooh-pooh resolutions, but it pains me that (per my archives) i posted only 73 times last year; comments or no comments, then, i'll be more prolific. i have also decided to flash more leg. adjust your own plans as needed.

CONSUMED AT THE CONCLUSION OF 2012: A PARTIAL LIST.

ippudo (restaurant). the vegetable hirata buns are high on my Greatest Sandwiches of All Time list, and the ramen is the best in new york (sorry, totto). it took us three passes to get a table when my sister and brother-in-law were in town last week, and not one of us held a grudge.

joseph anton (book, ongoing). salman rushdie's third-person memoir about the decade he lost to khomeini's fatwa (the imam called for his death in february of 1989 after the publication of the satanic verses, and he spent the next ten years under the british government's protection) raises a lot of questions: was his second wife really that crazy? should i read the verses again? do i have to start liking paul auster now? joseph anton - the two-thirds of it i've read, anyway - is both personal testimony and a stomp-your-feet-until-the-earth-trembles tale of how brave the publishing industry can be. who could tell a story like that about an ebook?

kitchen confidential (book). i thought anthony bourdain deserved a substantive shot at impressing me. he didn't.

life of pi (film). ang lee's majestic, no-foot-out-of-place compositions are precisely the sort of thing one wants to see in 3D - precisely the sort of thing i want to see in 3D, anyway - and i can't imagine a more graceful adaptation of yann martel's novel. it's treacly where the book is treacly, but it also makes you gasp where the book makes you gasp, and richard parker the digital tiger is a fine, fine tiger. possibly i cried when he suffered. i will not apologize for my feelings about tigers.

magic for beginners (book, ongoing). purchased on the strength of a staff recommendation at the strand; kelly link is, per both jonathan lethem and neil gaiman, "the best short story writer working today." i'm miserly when it comes to compliments like that, but i can tell you that "the faery handbag," her collection's first story (available free here) is the most original thing i've read in too long. fuck yeah, kelly link.

mission chinese nyc (restaurant). the hype is merited; we've ordered the takeout once and been to the restaurant twice, and i'd happily queue another three times this week if i thought my sore throat could take the heat. arrive at 5 with your whole party for a shot at the first seating; send a scout ant to get on the list early and plan to be in the neighborhood for an hour and a half if you can't. vegenauts, you want the (vegan versions of the) thrice-cooked bacon, the stir-fried pork jowl, the peanuts, and all of the pickles.

zero dark thirty (film). i will need to watch zero dark thirty again, for joe and i saw it when it was showing in like two theaters in the city and five in the whole country, and fools were swiveling flashlights, loitering behind the last row, and rushing in and out of the theater at our screening. it was particularly bad during the sequence in which the navy seals kill bin laden, and i was too jittery to focus. what the hell, people? i think i prefer the hurt locker, as i thought kathryn bigelow managed to flesh out jeremy renner's character in a few key scenes and i missed that with jessica chastain, but i admire her decision to tell a story that's still unfolding. is it cool that her film implies that enhanced interrogation brought bin laden down? i do think it would have been cowardly to make a film about the war on terror without addressing the fact that we tortured people. ZDT isn't a masterpiece, but it reinitiates conversations we don't have nearly enough.

03.04.11

for a handful of years in the mid-nineties, my family's summer vacation was a week at stanford sierra camp, an eccentric affair up near lake tahoe where alumni and their relatives weave pine-needle baskets, roast marshmallows, and hear lectures on global warming and judicial history. our week's featured speaker one year was sandra day o'connor, and the cabins were atwitter before she arrived: would she discuss contemporary cases? would there be room for everyone at the talk? would she stick around for square dancing? one of my friends was fishing up at witch's pond one evening, as one does, when with nary a rustle or snapped twig, sandra day o'connor materialized from the undergrowth. "justice is served," said she [i paraphrase], and he greeted her in the only way one can when confronted with a supreme court justice on a fine summer's eve: "this is my fish," he said, holding up his tin minnow bucket.

i'm married lady of the day over at east side bride; i haven't a tin minnow bucket, but these are my green pants.



they were $15 at a barneys warehouse sale a few years ago, and they make people exclaim things happily. it's entirely possible that "i love green pants!" is shorthand for "i love [that you are the one wearing] green pants [and i am safe over here];" i'm okay with that as well.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 if you were a supreme court justice, how would you announce yourself?

02 what's your most popular article of clothing?

03 would you wear green pants?

02.18.11

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 34

SURVIVOR: rabbit at rest (john updike)*
CHALLENGER: lit (mary karr)

i'm new to the one-two-three punch of mary karr's trio of memoirs (the liars' club, cherry, and lit), but i knew from the beginning that i'd prefer her to elizabeth eat, pray, love gilbert;** i knew karr's story would eventually involve david foster wallace, for one thing, and for another i was completely unable to imagine what her gelato-eating face looks like. karr also did a fairly decent job of convincing me that her motivation was at least as kapow- as it is cha-ching-based (liz gilbert, i'm looking at you again):

"I threw this book away twice," Karr says. "I walked around in my bathrobe for three days and made obscene gestures at the rafters. And there are a couple people I call at such times, sort of the way the president would push the red button. I'd call these people. So I called Don DeLillo, and DeLillo sends me a postcard that says 'write or die.' " Karr's reply speaks volumes about her thick-skinned perspective and dark humor. "I think I sent him one back that said 'write and die.' "

setting aside the fact that no one should write to don delillo, karr sold me on the idea that she decided she needed to tell us about becoming a drunk, a wife, a mother, a writer, a teetotaler, and a catholic, not necessarily in that order.

here's where that gets problematic, and i apologize in advance (this once) for a major excerpt. in an introduction to a published version of his screenplay for an education, nick hornby had some terribly interesting things to say about adapting lynn barber's memoir:

[B]y its very nature, memoir presents a challenge, consisting as it does of an adult mustering all the wisdom he or she can manage to look back at an earlier time in life. Almost all of us become wiser as we get older, so we can see pattern and meaning that we would not have been able to see at the time. Memoirists know it all, but the people they are writing about know next to nothing.

We become other things, too, as well as wise: more articulate, more cynical, less naive, more or less forgiving, depending on how things have turned out for us. The Lynn Barber who wrote the memoir - a celebrated journalist, known for her perspicacious, funny, occasionally devastating profiles of celebrities - shouldn't be audible in the voice of the central character in our film, not least because, as Lynn says in her essay, it was the very experiences that she was describing that formed the woman we know. In other words, there was no 'Lynn Barber' until she had received the eponymous education. Oh, this sounds obvious to the point of banality: a sixteen-year-old girl should sound different from her sixty-year-old self. What is less obvious, perhaps, is the way the sixty-year-old self seeps into every brush-stroke of the self-portrait in a memoir. Sometimes even the dialogue that Lynn provided for her younger version - perfectly plausible on the page - sounded too hard-bitten, when I thought about a living, breathing young actress saying the words.

somehow, karr hops back and forth between Wastrel Mary and Memoirist Mary in a way that makes both of those selves less knowable and less interesting. the first chapter, in which she has the shit scared out of her (and the her scared out of california) while hitchhiking along the beach at 17, gave me a sense of how good her other memoirs must be; too many of the other chapters are cutesy peek-a-boo games ("[m]y thesis advisor, louise [glück], baked ornate pastries at home, then sold them in local shops or restaurants") about writing programs and famous friends (if you're hanging out with, say, tobias wolff, just say you're hanging out with tobias wolff***). calling her ex-husband (the poet michael milburn, who agreed to a pseudonym in lieu of vetting karr's manuscript) "warren whitbread" auto-caricatures him (so much for a nuanced portrait of that marriage), mentioning that she, robert lowell, and anne sexton had been institutionalized at the same hospital trivializes...everyone, i think, and karr more or less loses my sympathy long before her moment of clarity and conversion to catholicism. which sucks, because sprinkled in with her didi-and-gogo, "don't question me! don't speak with me! stay with me!" show and tell are some really marvelous descriptions. her account of flying home to texas for her father's funeral, the horrible, hollow-stomached relief you feel when a long-suffering loved one finally dies, is wonderful. her much-anticipated (by me, anyway) run-ins with a puppyish david foster wallace, moreover, are just the details i want:

[on divvying up stolen cupcake frosting after an alcoholics anonymous meeting for which part of their carpool fell off the wagon]

David? I say, leaning forward.

Yes, ma'am. He turns down the radio.

Any chance you cadged that frosting?

Gross, Gerry says. You're not gonna eat that.

David unzips his backpack, flips off the frosting lid, and hands it back, saying, I feel like I should wipe the edge on my T-shirt. You know, sanitize it.

Taking the can, I dig in and run my finger around the edge, then stick it in my mouth just as Gerry's hand reaches back, hovering for the handoff.

karr's charming when asking her readers to make small emotional investments, but when she gets to lit's big sell - her sobriety and submission to a higher power after a number of signs - her salesmanship dries up. good - nay, miraculous - things (jobs, grants, interested agents) happen to her after she prays for them, but we never quite believe she's the slacker she says she is: though she's "unhindered by a high school diploma" and admits that she's "published one slim volume of verses and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in cambridge," her fortune's pretty clearly not falling from the sky. then again, does it matter that i'm not buying her story? as i avoided this review by reading up on karr around the web, i found the slate interview in which she says she "didn't [write lit] to help anybody. I did it for the money. I did it because I’m greedy and I like living in New York." oh, that thick-skinned perspective and dark humor! i'm having a hard time feeling something after all.

VICTOR: updike; he's like three mary karrs tall, or was, and would flatten her with a description of septuagenarian golfers while she fumbled for a salty texas epithet.

as lit was the last book i finished in december, that means...rabbit at rest was the best book i read last year, and updike is the first inhabitant of THUNDERTOME valhalla. clear the arena for 2011! (two months late, but shh.)

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how would you respond to a WRITE OR DIE postcard from don delillo?

02 if you've read karr, do you buy her modesty?

03 would you share frosting with a casual carpool?

04 if you could get away with referring to a literary light by a nickname in mixed company, to whom would you refer, and what would you call them? dibs on peaches hemingway.

05 if you were spending a week in iceland at the end of march, how many hours would you be willing to spend on an off-season bus to see necropants (defined below****)?

06 would you wear necropants?

*previous battle here.

**full disclosure: i haven't read all of eat, pray, love, though i have read committed. it was okay.

***unless you're a stanford undergrad, in which case you should know that talking about "tobi" makes you look like alex trebek when he pronounces something in spanish.

****"Of all the strange displays at the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft, perhaps the most bizarre is a plastic replica of the legendary 'necropants' - trousers made from the skin of a dead man's legs and groin. It was commonly believed that the necropants would spontaneously produce money when worn, so long as the donor made an honest verbal agreement that his corpse could be skinned upon his death. Once dead and buried, the donor corpse had to be unearthed at the dead of night, then a magic rune and a coin from a poor widow...were placed in the dead man's scrotum.

The necropants brought incredible wealth to [their] wearer - anytime money was needed, one could reach down into the scrotal area and...voila! There was a catch, however; if you were to die wearing the necropants, your soul would be condemned to roam the earth until the end of time." (lonely planet iceland, 7th ed.)

03.03.09: bed bugs, days 1-2

oh, internets. we are hoboes in our own home. we got our homework assignments* from the exterminator late sunday; after a magical evening on the floor in our living room (naturally, the pump for our air mattress broke), we started turning our apartment into garbage. two full suitcases and a duffel bag of clothing came out from under the bed and ended up on the curb (in sealed plastic bags); almost all of the bedding from our wedding registry is now gone. our management company agreed to foot our dry cleaning bill,** so the clothing and bedding that wasn't too infested to save was hauled up the street to the cleaners last night (we won't get it back until after the exterminators come, and then it has to stay in sealed plastic until retreatment; last night we slept under our coats, and i've been wearing the same black tank top since sunday morning).

ironically, the mattress and box spring are staying with us after all: trying to get them out of the apartment would have inflicted critters on all of our neighbors, and the exterminator tells us they'll be fine after reconditioning and encasement. that is my first takeaway message for you, internets: buy a bugproof encasement for your mattress and box spring. in our case, it will seal in and starve any stragglers; in yours, it'll prevent infestation completely. seriously: buy one online right now. best hundred bucks you'll ever spend.

my second takeaway message is that disposable tyvek suits are more translucent that one would imagine; don't get so distracted by looking like a beastie boy as you douse your apartment with pesticide that you forget to put on extra pants before dashing outside with the vacuum bag.

still waiting for the exterminator to call (they were snowed in yesterday and no one showed up to work). think good thoughts for us.

30-gallon trash bags filled: 25
today's cost: $200

*an eleven-item tale of property loss. here's #4:

Empty all closets, dressers, bookshelves, wall units, hutches, breakfronts, etc. throughout the residence, including platform bed drawers (if any). All items that have been removed from these areas should be inspected, cleaned and put into plastic bags and sealed tightly. All of the above mentioned items must be vacuumed once they have been emptied to eliminate any live bedbugs or eggs that may be present. Also, remove all framed pictures and decorative items from walls and vacuum. Place vacuum bag in a sealed plastic bag and discard outside for garbage removal.

**just the dry cleaning, mind you. special treatment for the laundry will be another $300-$400.

01.16.09: at night, the ice weasels come

(e-mail) 1: I wanted you to know that I froze to death on the walk to work this morning and am now but an icy lump in front of the T-Mobile store, so you are free to marry George.

(e-mail) 2: It is as I foretold!

Are you being snarky, or was the walk as brutal as I imagine it was?

(e-mail) 1: I am being snarky. It really wasn’t that bad, though I did change into pants because my sweater smelled funny.

06.22.06

it's the end of an era here at casa de ladymag. as of 4pm this afternoon, i'm out of my very own office and on my way to the new megabuilding. the loss is incalculable: no more reckless book-hoarding,* no more AC/DC at top volume as i pick through medical studies, no more lounging behind my big desk sans pants. just look at those stacks of dollies, waiting to rip my stuff apart and carry it across the city like so many malevolent fuzzy rainbow ants. "my stuff" is a misnomer, though - we aren't allowed to have plants, candles, bulletin boards, or "large personal items" in our new digs, so i'll be lucky if i squeak in with my shiny, shiny pen cup and a few photos of joe and the cats.

then, o then, there's the likely new dress code. since i'm rarely needed at meetings and never have to meet clients, i roll into the office in tees and jeans - never together, mind you, but we define our 'office casual' rather liberally. now that we're to share escalators and elevators with the folks in corporate, i fear that nylons and i are going to get reacquainted.

goodbye, sweet privacy. hello, um, pants.

*this is probably a good thing - i don't really need a copy of barbara boxer's first novel or fifteen vegan cookbooks - but the apartment is looking pretty crowded now that my lovely auxiliary library is taking a dirt nap and its contents have been repatriated. i had twelve huge shelves, people.